On the 23rd of December 1948, an Eighth Army liaison plane lifted off from an American airstrip in Japan and flew east over open water. On board was an Army major named Luther Frierson, carrying what was left of seven men. Somewhere around thirty miles east of Yokohama, over the Pacific, he scattered their ashes across a wide stretch of sea until there was nothing left to scatter. One of those seven was Hideki Tojo, the general who ran Japan’s government when its carriers struck Pearl Harbor three years and three months earlier.
The same American Army had worked through an evening to keep that man breathing. Frierson put the day on paper. His certificate was stamped secret, and in it he wrote that he had personally scattered the ashes of the following executed war criminals at sea. Then he listed them.
The paper went into a government file and stayed there for seventy years until a history professor from Nihon University named Hiroaki Takazawa came across it in the National Archives in Washington while searching for something else entirely. He found it in 2018 and made it public three years later. Until then, where Tojo had ended up had never been stated anywhere the public could see. The same file sets out the night in clock times.
At 10:02 in the morning, once a clerk had taken each dead man’s fingerprints, soldiers loaded seven caskets onto a two-and-a-half-ton Army truck. By about 3:40 in the afternoon, the convoy reached a Graves Registration Platoon in Yokohama for a last check. At 7:25, the truck moved on to a crematorium half an hour’s drive away. Within ten minutes, the caskets were in the ovens.
Frierson wrote that he took special care not to overlook even the smallest particle. The question sits on the table from the first page. Why would an Army spend its own medicine, and by every account its own blood, to keep a man alive at the end of the war, and then go to this much trouble three years later to make sure not a grain of him could ever be found? The two jobs were the same job done twice.
In the month of the surrender, a dead Tojo would have been a man who chose his own ending, and the Americans who came to his house had orders to bring him in. Three winters on, a buried Tojo would have been a grave, and reporting on Takazawa’s find put the American purpose plainly: keep the remains away from anyone who might treat the dead men as martyrs. First, a verdict, then nothing to visit. Everything between those two dates was the long, careful work of getting from one to the other.
Take one step back from the plane. Hours before Frierson’s flight, just after midnight, seven men were hanged inside Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. Tojo was a week short of his sixty-fourth birthday. Each of them had asked for one hour alone with a Buddhist priest named Shunsho Hanayama, and each was given it.
The prison had improvised a chapel inside the cell block for the last services. Watching for the Allied counsel were four men from four governments: William Sebald for Washington, General Shang Chen for China, Patrick Shaw for the British Commonwealth, and a Soviet lieutenant general for the Soviet Union. Sebald’s cable to the State Department afterward had nothing in it about last words, only the witnesses, the priest, the chapel, and the cremation. Take three more days back.
On the 20th of December, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on a set of emergency petitions for men convicted in Tokyo whose argument came down to this. General MacArthur had set up their court and confirmed its sentences, so it was an American proceeding, and the highest court in the land could overturn it. The justices had heard argument over two days, the 16th and 17th, and they answered in a short, unsigned opinion that changed the shape of the whole story. The tribunal, they said, was not a tribunal of the United States.
MacArthur had set it up as the agent of the Allied powers, and no court in the country had any power to review what it had done. Justice Murphy dissented, and Justice Jackson took no part. The men in Sugamo had been tried by an alliance, and the alliance could not be appealed to one of its own members. Two of the men sentenced to hang, Kenji Doihara and Koki Hirota, had applied, along with five who had drawn prison terms.
Tojo had not. He never asked Washington for anything. Before the petitions, on the 24th of November, General MacArthur went on the radio to say that he had reviewed the sentences, and every one of them would stand. Back again to the 12th of November.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East had been reading its judgment aloud for more than a week by then, and on that day it handed down sentences. On the bench sat eleven judges. Nine came from the nations that had signed the surrender in Tokyo Bay. The court’s charter had been amended to add two more seats, one for India and one for the Philippines.
The trial had run since May of 1946. Four hundred nineteen witnesses had testified in the courtroom, another 779 by affidavit or deposition, and the transcript filled more than 48,000 pages. The judgment found Tojo guilty on the conspiracy count, on the counts of waging aggressive war against China, the United States, the British Commonwealth, the Netherlands, and France, and on the count of ordering, authorizing, or permitting the mistreatment of prisoners. The language on captives was specific.
As head of the government, the judges wrote, he had known in 1942 that men were dying on the Bataan Death March, and he did not call for a report on the incident when he visited the Philippines a year later. He made what the court called perfunctory inquiries and took no action. Nobody was punished. He had advised putting captured soldiers to work on the railway through Burma and Siam, and when word of the conditions reached him, he sent one officer to look.
The only result the court could find was the trial of a single company commander. The court also held him responsible for an instruction he had pressed again and again: the prisoners who did not work should not eat. The sentence was death by hanging. Before that judgment came a defense, and Tojo gave it himself.
He took the stand the day after Christmas 1947 and stayed on it into January, accepting that he had been in charge, arguing that every step Japan took had been lawful self-defense, and telling the court he felt he had done what was right and true. On the last day of the year, he very nearly gave away the one thing he had plainly meant to protect. He said that no Japanese would ever act against the will of the throne. If the war had been fought, the throne had willed it.
The historian John Dower later traced how that was undone. Working through a former Japanese general named Ryukichi Tanaka, who had strong ties to the chief American prosecutor, Joseph Keenan, the prosecution arranged for word to reach Tojo that the answer had to be fixed. Within days, he was back on the stand, telling the court that his sovereign had consented to war reluctantly. Keeping Hirohito out of the dock was occupation policy, and the prisoner carried that policy for the Americans all the way to the gallows.
He spent that trial in Sugamo, and Sugamo kept him in working order. In the summer of 1946, an American Navy dentist named Jack Mallory reached Tokyo, and soon afterward he was taken to the prison to look at Tojo’s mouth. A colleague, George Foster, pulled the general’s remaining upper teeth, and Mallory built him a full upper plate. By his own account, written half a century later, the other dentists pushed him to put something on it.
He held out at first on professional grounds. Then he settled on a compromise, and along the rim of the plate he engraved the words “Remember Pearl Harbor” in Morse code. It stayed a secret until two more dentists joined the clinic in February of 1947. One of them wrote home to his parents in Texas.
The story reached a local radio station, and the wire services started calling. The dental commander ordered the code removed before the story could grow. That night, the two men woke the prisoner, took the plate, and ground the dots and dashes off in the prison clinic. A colonel telephoned Foster the next morning about an item in Stars and Stripes.
Foster denied everything. The colonel took his word. The only full account of that night comes from the man who held the drill. Before Sugamo, there was a hospital bed.
It stood in the Army’s 98th Evacuation Hospital at Yokohama. Tojo reached it on the night of the 11th of September, 1945, with a bullet hole clean through his body and Army plasma already in his veins. The first newspaper dispatches out of Tokyo reported a number of transfusions of American blood, and Carl Mydans of Life magazine photographed him receiving one. The Smithsonian still holds a print under the title “Tojo Receiving Blood from an American Army Unit.
” Who gave that blood? The files never say. Walter Tanaka, an Eighth Army interrogation officer of Japanese descent, recalled decades later that he understood a GI sergeant had been the donor, and he remembered headlines back home about a GI’s blood saving the enemy. Though he was careful to say he had all of it secondhand.
The two fullest dispatches from that day name the surgeon, the medics, the correspondents, and the interpreter. Neither names a donor. The general commanding the Eighth Army, Robert Eichelberger, came to the hospital, and Tojo asked him from the bed to help build a better Japan. The United Press correspondent in the room wrote that Eichelberger made no reply.
The papers could not agree on the path of the bullet either. Yank, the Army’s own magazine, put it in the left side of the chest, just past the heart, and out through the back. The United Press report said the stomach, below the heart, the spot, its correspondent noted, where the cut of a ritual suicide would have gone. The First Cavalry Division surgeon, who stitched the wound shut, thought it might have nicked the lower edge of the heart without breaking through the lining around it.
That surgeon was Captain James Johnson. He reached the house at half past six that evening with a lieutenant named Frank Aquino and a technician fifth grade, and they started plasma. At seven o’clock, he told the crowded room that Tojo had a good chance of pulling through, adding that men survive injuries like this in combat all the time. At about a quarter past seven, four military policemen from the First Cavalry lifted the general, still alive, and carried him out to a waiting ambulance.
The two hours before Johnson came belonged to a lieutenant from Saratoga, New York, named John Wilpers. About an hour after the shot, a Japanese physician arrived, examined the general, and was told by his own patient to leave him alone. Wilpers ordered him, at gunpoint by later accounts, to keep working. The man told the Americans that Tojo had an hour or two at most, and that his own hospital had been bombed out.
A policeman went away and came back with a nurse carrying compresses. Wilpers put them on. Then he went and sat in the hallway and smoked. An army that had spent nearly four years fighting this man’s government spent that evening arguing with his own physician to keep him from dying.
Back in the study, before any of that, the room was small and nearly square, with afternoon sun coming in through frosted glass and gunsmoke hanging under the ceiling. Tojo sat slumped in a chair in a white short-sleeve shirt, military breeches, and high brown riding boots. On the wall above him hung a large painting of himself on horseback among his staff, Japanese troops and tanks breaking a Chinese line and a ragged Chinese flag trampled in the foreground. A sword leaned against the wall.
On a small table laid on a white silk scarf were a short knife and a second smaller pistol. A bound copy of the emperor’s surrender rescript lay on the table as well. The gun in his hand was a . 32 caliber Colt automatic.
Later that afternoon, someone found a note explaining why he had aimed at his heart and not his head. He wanted everyone to know for certain that he was dead. He was not. When he came around, he told one of the reporters that he had wanted to die by the sword, and the pistol had to do.
Before that, the door. The Counter Intelligence Corps party had pulled up a few minutes before four o’clock, led by Major Paul Kraus, who told the waiting press they were taking the general to headquarters in Yokohama. Correspondents had been chasing Tojo for two days. A police guard stalled the Americans at the gate.
Then Tojo himself leaned out of a window and asked through an interpreter whether these men were really from General MacArthur’s headquarters and whether they had come to arrest him. Kraus held up his credentials. Tojo motioned them toward the front door and shut the window. The Americans had just reached the door when the shot came.
Kraus and Wilpers forced it. Wilpers kicked in a second door to the study, and Kraus shouted for nobody to shoot. The United Press timed the shot at 4:21 in the afternoon on the 11th of September, 1945.
Three years later, the Army that had saved his life took his ashes out over the Pacific and made sure that no one would ever find where they lay.
